Scritti Politti: Post-Punk Ecstasy

Hearing the voice of Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside for the first time is a little like walking into a room of blonde, smiling sorority sisters—you’re not sure whether to swoon or vomit.

It’s one of the slickest voices in pop, sliding like honey into each oh-so-deliberately placed consonant. But on Scritti Politti’s first album in seven years, Gartside’s voice is also used to great effect; “White Bread, Black Beer” may be the best record of 2006.

Scritti Politti is an unfamiliar name today, but it was a different story in the 80s. After rattling around the British post-punk scene for years, Gartside and Co. decided they were tired of making music that was barely listened to or talked about outside their squalid Camden flat.

Gartside masterminded “Cupid & Psyche ’85,” an intellectual attack on the language of love songs wrapped in explosive, complicated dance beats. The lead single, “Perfect Way,” received heavy airplay on MTV, and for good reason.

With “White Bread, Black Beer,” Gartside has moved from deconstructing the love song to working out how love can tear itself apart—among many, many other things. If this shift makes his thoughts a little muddier (as he puts it, “Tying everything together / so I can’t think it anymore”), it also makes them much richer.

And it’s his voice that does the enriching. It’s gorgeous to the point of being a little too gorgeous, with a disarming, somewhat alien quality that lends his words a power they would otherwise lack.

It’s nothing new to compare love and addiction, but Gartside’s delivery is incisively eerie because he teases one out of the other instead of just smashing them together. “Let me show you my arms” gets repeated again and again in the song “Throw,” and it’s up to you to decide whether it’s the slyest of sexual advances or a nod to heroin abuse.

But love and drugs aren’t Gartside’s only vices. The guy who sings like Al Green sweet-talking a 12-year old devotes an entire verse of his album’s opening song to Run-D.M.C song titles, and his production owes a lot to hip-hop.

Gartside is the rare white pop musician who can use rap without exploiting it. When Ben Folds gets the Ivy Leaguers bumpin’ with “Bitches ain’t shit but hoes and tricks,” it’s funny only because a smiling guy with rectangular glasses is singing it. When Gartside croons “Gonna rock you honey / ready or not / gonna steal your money,” it’s actually funny.

But it’s even better when he sings, “Oh, keep your love away from me / Jesus, keep your hands where I can see,” a line as hilarious for its paranoia as anything else. Come on man, He was a Middle-Eastern Jew, not a Boston Catholic priest.

Gartside is not the type to occupy the later years of his career with vain attempts to recreate an instinctive original greatness, as many musicians do; his is the type of music that gets better as he learns things. “White Bread, Black Beer,” masterfully wraps up humor, sex, unease, and stutter-starts of musical brilliance to produce a veiled, intellectual self-portrait of one of pop’s most fascinating thinkers.

—Reviewer Richard S. Beck can be reached at rbeck@fas.harvard.edu.